This may seem like a snitty little tirade, but it's something that bothers me a lot. People use the term "web 2.0" to describe new, web based businesses, and I think it's just so much jargon.

I've suggested that Twitter is just the Internet equivalent of Sherlock Holmes' London Times, that Facebook is the bulletin board in the campus commons, that RSS is a throwback to flat files of the 80's.

Web 2.0 is an Edsel with fins.

This pretty much falls under my "there's nothing really new" cynical tirade. The more optimistic side of me knows that there really are new and innovative ideas, but let's face it, those ideas involve things like Velcro, magnetic levitation trains, or the backbone of the Internet itself.

But "Web 2.0" doesn't hit the world of dreams and wonder, unless you count "I wonder about that dream..." Just because you say you're doing something earth shatteringly innovative doesn't make it so.

Part of the problem is in the definition. The current wiki entry doesn't seem to give a solid explanation of what "Web 2.0" means. It seems to mean social networking or perhaps cool AJAX tricks (which is just JavaScript and XML tricks, kind of cool but not Velcro).

It gets back to my argument about tool users versus the folks who create the tools. The things we do on the Internet are amazing, but they are amazing because of the amazing invention of the Internet itself, or "Web negative 1."

I think that's what really offends me about the idea of Web 2.0 -- whatever the kids in the coffee shops are doing with JavaScript and social media, no matter how interesting and new it may seem, the web sites people are building today under the banner of "Web 2.0" don't come close to the true invention and impact of the web that was there 10 or 15 years ago, and is still there, albeit a little faster with a few more bells and whistles.

But bells and whistles do not make a fundamental shift in the universe.